Freedom of Wine Information Act

Yesterday, someone from the Baltimore City Public Schools took an hour out of their day and ran through every listing in my Maryland and Virginia Winery Map.  I’m pretty sure it was manual and not a bot or search engine spider because it took them just a hair under an hour to get through all the listings. The same thing happened to my happy hour listings site last week.  Both sites were written in Ruby using the Rails framework, which lends itself to this sort of thing.

Companies go to great lengths to prevent this kind of information harvesting.  If you have sensitive information like private data or the stuff that Salesforce keeps around, then of course it makes sense.  But, we’re at the forefront of an age where non-private information is going to be free.  I don’t fly the rally flag that “information wants to be free,” I’m just saying that it will be free.  The music industry is realizing this.  The newspaper industry is realizing this.  The movie industry will get around to it soon.  People aren’t going to be able to make the same living doing the same things because the cost of replicating their information or art is going to zero and it is going there fast.

Instead of re-thinking business models or embracing change, people still get bent out of shape about it.  I don’t.  Go ahead and scrape the whole site.  The person who scraped it yesterday may have been doing something cool with it like making a collage or something.  Maybe they were just really into something I don’t understand.  Who knows.   I didn’t create the information on the winery map, I just went around and harvested it from all over the place, often from the wineries themselves.  I even made it easy to do (in case you’re thinking of joining in) by providing everything in list form.  Run that through your DB import script and go to town.  There are other winery info websites out there, some are better than mine, and I’m too busy to really worry about it.

My point is that everyone who makes money on sales of information has the clock ticking on them.  The wine business is lucky that their product is real and you can’t reel off a torrent of 2000 Grange.  You can, though, protect retail listings, or charge for your reviews.  Go right ahead, but that will change, and the next generation will find it to be a foreign concept.